However, the classical edifice of the exchange is engulfed in an ocean of skyscrapers that shut off the light over Wall Street. Once there really was a city wall (Wall), but much has changed since then – from here to the city limits today one must travel about two hours by car, and a week on foot.
The Statue of Liberty can be seen from Battery Park with binoculars. To get a closer look at the giant green woman, you have to take a ferry, the ticket queue for which twice encircled the aforementioned park. When buying tickets, one goes through stringent anti-terrorist screening, and a similar check follows when boarding the ferry. Still, the American authorities prudently closed the lift to the statue's torch because of terrorist threats.
In general, in the USA the threat of terrorism seems an everyday state of life. Turnstiles are everywhere, and to pass through them you are made to take off your jacket, coat and shoes – all of which goes through X-ray checks. According to a number of ordinary Americans I spoke with, the threats of terrorist attacks and the authorities' corresponding efforts to prevent them have completely destroyed the famous American freedom. It has become much harder to enter the country, and obtaining citizenship is a whole enterprise in itself. There are bans and checks everywhere. And since most American residents are foreigners, first or second generation, they came here precisely for freedom, and they wanted to spit on terrorism. As a result, what is happening greatly outrages them.
New York's Broadway struck me with its giant buildings, in comparison with which people seem like insects. Slightly larger insects seem to be the City Hall building, built in the 19th century, and St. Paul's Chapel, the oldest church in the city, where President George Washington used to go to pray (during working hours) – at that time the country's capital was New York, and the federal District of Columbia had not yet been thought up. Actually, it was for the president, they say, that the only diagonal road – Broadway – was cut through the grid of Manhattan's streets and avenues.
However, the most curious impression from America's largest metropolis for me was visiting the ethnic neighborhoods – Chinese (Chinatown), Italian (Little Italy) and Russian (Brighton Beach). It is simply amazing how much the newcomers have managed to change the atmosphere of the city around them – on the next street it is still America, but here, on Mott Street, it is already deep China: with all its shops of small unnecessary items, cheap clothing, fragrant roots and herbs, with huge Chinese characters on every building. Here on the streets you hear only Chinese speech, and the names of these streets are also duplicated in English and Chinese. They themselves, apparently, have the feeling that they never left Shanghai.
A little further along Mulberry Street there is a shop promoting Tibetan independence – you can do that here, but in China I would not advise it. Nor would I advise trying jokes like the one I saw near Central Station. On the sidewalk stands a large square cage in which they have managed to put a sad (which is understandable) Chinese woman. The victim's hands are cuffed and tied to the bars of the cage. Next to her stands one more of the 1.3 billion Chinese, in military uniform and with a rubber baton in his hand. 'This happens in China,' reads an explanatory inscription on the asphalt. Before my eyes, thousands of New Yorkers passed by without a flicker of expression on their faces. Apparently, such tricks are nothing new to them.
Chinatown directly borders Little Italy, which, unfortunately, today has little to remind one of the blessed times of the Godfather's heyday. After the Corleone family retired from business, there are fewer and fewer pizzerias, less Italian speech, and the Chinese next door, as is their habit, breed a lot, increasingly crowding out the Italian inhabitants of the neighborhood. Still, there is still plenty to see here.
But nothing, of course, can compare in strength of feeling with the Russian quarter of Brighton Beach. Already on leaving the metro (from the center to Brighton it takes at least forty minutes) I was nearly knocked off my feet by Russian speech – even though I knew what I was getting into. Here they speak only Russian, and with that inimitable Odessa accent which, as I had previously thought, survived only in Jewish jokes and Zhvanetsky's monologues. But this is not Russia – that is the most surprising thing. This is the Soviet Union of 1985, carefully and in detail recreated by those who fled from it across the ocean.
I walked along Brighton Beach Avenue for only twenty minutes, but I had the feeling that I was back in the cooperative childhood. What signs in the shop windows! What faces of the salespeople, throwing goods across the counter right at the customer! In an establishment with the loud name 'Varenichnaya', the waiter listened to my wishes without a hint of a smile, answered questions in monosyllables and with a look of clear weariness on his face, and threw the bill for my miserable pelmeni onto the table, apparently barely restraining himself from shouting 'Choke on it!' I was ready to kiss him – where else would I have had the opportunity to return to my native USSR?
'On Deribasovskaya the weather is fine, in Brighton Beach it rains again' – I kept remembering this film while strolling along this last street of a bygone era. Perhaps this was my most vivid impression of New York.